


made of paper

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Friends With Benefits, Sexual Content, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:22:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s here for a glamour charm. That’s it. That’s all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	made of paper

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Hajra and Asa.

“I need a favor,” Dick breathes into the pale crook of Zatanna’s neck, his fingers fluttering over the contours of her hips.

She lets out a rasp of laughter and tightens her fist in his hair, tugging him away from the pulse in her throat to kiss him, with poise and passion that he can’t imagine being contained in such a simple touch. Ebony curls waver at the edge of her nose as she breathes arhythmically, and he presses himself against her, to the wall. It makes her sigh softly against his tongue. Her fishnets snag on his utility belt and he sheds it, haphazardly, using his free hand to stroke the side of her face.

“And once again…” she says quietly, in a high and quivering whisper that makes him ache, “You show – a _dazzling_  command of… opening lines. Bravo.”

“That’s usually how these things start, isn’t it?” he murmurs, trailing his hand down from her cheek and along her shoulder, her arm, stopping at her elbow and gripping it. 

“These things  _usually_  start,” she corrects him airily, “with this.”

He feels her fingernails twitch their way under the edge of his domino mask, and she’s peeled it off in an instant, tossing it onto the floor. He blinks, accustoming himself to its absence, and she hums with a contentment, a happiness, that should worry him, but that never has. 

“But to be fair,” she adds, “you  _are_  a bit out of practice.”

“I need…” His words fizzle out the moment he gives himself a moment to really look at her – the pink tilt of her eloquent lips, the dark curvature of her eyebrows, the blue of her eyes and the flush to her cheeks, such a warm dissonance to her crisp black tailcoat and sparse white dress shirt. 

It’s been a while since he’s seen her like this – naturally,  _they had a history_ , so it wasn’t as though the sight was new – and it makes his stomach do that fluttering and that twisting that it had when he was a skinny thirteen-year-old with an entirely disconcerting urge to kiss the magician’s daughter, in some fleet little corner, when no one would know.  

They’d never really made much out of it, barring their spontaneous  _osculations_  (as Red Tornado had defined it, once, when he had caught them) in empty rooms of the Cave, their mutual laughter and their faint touches when they didn’t think anyone would notice, and, eventually, the clumsy little trysts that would inexplicably sneak up on them on rainy nights; the line of her jaw in his palm and the feel of her tongue whisking across his lower lip. 

…Right. Nothing much at all.

The commitment had, truth be told, scared her – especially with the ever-hanging phantom of her father resting on her shoulders, making her sob against Dick’s chest until her mascara ran so bountifully it made her eyelids stick together when it dried. And it had scared him, too – he was far too busy leaping through the shadows, being fast and fathomless, making light of anything and everything that came near him. He and Zatanna had been a lark, really; as always – a playful exchange of banter and contact and a convenient tendency to forget all of the last nights.

They had been holding off on this for a while, too – for some unidentifiable reason, though probably involving the fact that she is still bitter about not knowing his real name – but now he finally has an excuse to touch her like this, to make it seem like it’s a trade, a game of wits, instead of the simple and bone-grabbing desire that he wants to see her and hear her and smell her, jasmine and vanilla in his hands, enchanting.

“I need…” he tries again, moving against her in something like a plea for her clothes to join his mask on the floor. She meets him with ease, laughing huskily into his mouth, and the sound is enough to make his hands pull off her jacket in one motion, to start unbuttoning her blouse.  _Glamour charm, Dick. Glamour charm…_

She puts one of her hands over his, halting him. He pulls back and stares at her, dazed, his mouth vaguely, inquiringly open. She’s smirking. 

“Let’s talk about my needs first, shall we?” she suggests coyly, easily finding the zipper at the back of his kevlar and slowly, agonizingly dragging it down. She peels the suit off of him with brisk expertise, and it crumples to the floor, where he steps out of it and kicks it away, his bare feet silent on the frayed Indian rug that Bruce had given him when he’d moved out. His gloves lie discarded beside it. The tips of her fingers linger at the band of his briefs and she smiles, dulcetly, to herself, her head bowed in something equal to shyness.

“I missed you,” he blurts out without thinking, immediately reproachful of the stupid honesty of it, the uncharacteristic simplicity. It bears down on the two of them for a moment and he forgets how to breathe, fumbling for a rectification as she blinks hazily up at him, her dark lashes low over the cerulean blue that twists his stomach into knots.

She reaches slightly up and cups his face in her hands (she’s so much shorter without her heeled boots, her stockinged toes curling into the threads of the rug). Her eyes flicker between his, calculating, curious. He opens his mouth to try to save himself but she stops him by catching it in hers, messier this time, wet and desperate, swollen with breath, and it almost tears him apart.

Her upper lip slides against his when she whispers, softly, tenderly, “I missed you, too.” 

That does it. That’s the last straw. He doesn’t falter with the buttons of her blouse, doesn’t fumble with her bra, doesn’t tear her shorts or her fishnets or her purple lace underwear when he rolls them down over her thighs one at a time and throws them across the room, where they land crookedly on his bedside table. 

She pulls his briefs off in one fell swoop, holding them triumphantly and quirking a brow before flicking them aside, and the moonlight rakes across their backs as he pins her, reverently, to the wall, to the unsightly beige wallpaper that’s been there for decades before he’d started renting the place.

She is so bracing in his hands, her skin an effortless expanse of coolness and calm, almost pearlescent in the light from the moon outside, from the reflection of the snow on the fire escape. They have a history, all right. It had never really hit him, until now, the weight of that little colloquialism. A history. A vast compendium of moments and instants and growth, reaching and fumbling and finding each other in the dark, only to walk away toward the light again, trying their best not to look back. A hundred chances to lose one another, all mostly his fault, as they almost always will be; a hundred chances to reel each other back in again, their hands red and raw from exertion. 

“It’s Dick,” he whispers, ragged and small, into the hollow of her ear.

Her hands brush the skin of his thighs and come to rest at his waist, and her fingernails dig into him so slightly that it almost tickles, and he lets out a quiet breath of  _Zee_. 

“I can see that.” She folds her lips in to keep from laughing, her eyes flicking downwards, glittering with mirth. It’s middle school all over again. Sigh.

“No,” he tells her, pulling as much meaning into it as he can. He finally pulls back, gazing down at her through bleary eyes, through the haze and the intoxication of her scent and her movements. She is blinking up at him, eyebrows furrowed. “My name. My name’s Dick. Dick Grayson.”

He sweeps his fingers carefully and lightly up her side until it makes her shiver and lets his hand stop at her breast, leaning down and kissing the skin above it, impossibly soft and immaculate and practically iridescent, his lips closing around her nipple. She arches against him, and her moan is quiet, disbelieving, still catching up to what he’s just told her.

“I thought you ought to know,” he whispers. “I mean, after everything—”

“ _Dick_ ,” she says, half a whine, half a test, and the sound of his name swirling from the back of her mouth, like a flood, makes him shudder, makes him _want_ her. His erection throbs and she seems to sense it, spreading her legs as he hoists her up, propping her against the wall, his mouth hungrily agog at the dip in her collarbone. “What… what was it you said you needed, again? My brain’s a little wonky.” 

God, he loves her. He lets himself admit it, just for a second, in the darkness of his tiny Blüdhaven apartment, as she weighs his name and lets out some flighty little quip, a remark so distinctly bubbly and  _Zatanna_  that it fizzes in the back of his mind. 

“I’d say it’s you,” he says, evenly, breezily, trying so hard to conceal the thudding of his heart as her breasts brush against him, “But that seems kinda – overdoing it.”

“Dick,” she repeats, sounding giddy. “Oh my gosh. You’re a loser.”

“I try my best,” he replies, mouth finding her collarbone, and she sighs shallowly. 

“Please,” she whispers, hoarse, and he obliges her, lowering her until she wraps her legs around his hips to pull him inside of her, and she’s warmer there. He honestly can’t remember what he came here for anymore. She laughs, quietly, with ecstasy and bewilderment, and she almost doesn’t stop. It’s a beautiful sound, a fine accompaniment to the silent dance of the snow, to the rattle of his broken radiator. 

She stays there that night, her hair spilling over his chest as he gazes at the ceiling and strokes it, absentmindedly, instinctively. She speaks backwards in her sleep, sometimes, and things in the room float or change color for brief little seconds, but maybe he’s dreaming by then – maybe it would be a horrible loss to wake up. 


End file.
